Colin Wilson: Strength to Dream
Marcus Williamson
Colin Wilson was one of the most prolific and eclectic writers of the 20th century. In more than books and countless articles and contributions to other works, published over 50 years, he covered subjects as diverse as existentialism, esotericism and the occult, religion, biography and several volumes of autobiography. It is his groundbreaking work on existentialism and creative thinking, The Outsider, published to wide critical acclaim in , that remains his best known work.
Wilson was born in Leicester in , the son of a shoemaker. He left school aged 16 and over the next eight years took on a variety of unskilled jobs while writing. “I kept a voluminous journal, which was several million words long by the time I was 24,” he recalled. Since the age of 12 he had been preoccupied with asking the meaning of human existence and at 14 had read George Bernard Shaw’s Man and Superman, from which he realised that “I was not the first human being to ask the question.”
Living rough on Hampstead Heath, working at a café and spending his days at the Reading Room of the Bri
Other Stuff
“Good writers have two things in common; they prefer to be understood rather than admired; and they do not write for knowing and over-acute readers.” [Nietzsche, Human, all too Human, ].
Judged by Nietzsche’s criteria, Colin Wilson is a good writer. In his native Britain the mainstream critical reaction after his initial success there was that his primary motivation was to be “admired” and nothing more. An objective reading of his work will demonstrate this to be quite untrue, but as Wilson&#;s oeuvre is vast and sometimes difficult to locate, this type of objectivity cannot be realised without some long term effort and a little cultural de-conditioning.
Any reader of Wilson who is unburdened with either academic specialism or an obsession with yesterday’s papers is able to engage directly with his ideas. As Wilson’s work is concerned with the problems of prejudice within consciousness, the tradition of missing the point critically is a revealing one. From The Outsider onwards, far too much of the English speaking media has concentrated on his brief fame &#; and subsequent lack of it &#; at the expense of engaging with his highly intriguing mix of philos
Wilson, Colin
BORN: , Leicester, England
NATIONALITY: British
GENRE: Fiction, nonfiction
MAJOR WORKS:
The Outsider ()
Ritual in the Dark ()
Adrift in Soho ()
Man Without a Shadow: The Diary of an Existentialist (), published in the United States as The Sex Diary of Gerard Sorme
Necessary Doubt ()
Overview
Colin Wilson shot to fame in with his first book, The Outsider, a lively and wide-ranging survey of social and spiritual alienation. The book quickly became a best seller in Britain and the United States and made its previously unknown author, a self-educated twenty-four-year-old from the English Midlands, into an international celebrity. But Wilson soon fell from grace, and critics savaged his second book, Religion and the Rebel (). Since then, however, he has produced more than one hundred books on topics such as philosophy, psychology, literature, murder, sexuality, and the occult.
Works in Biographical and Historical Context
Eclectic Early Years Colin Henry Wilson was the first child of Arthur Wilson, a boot and shoe salesman, and Annetta Jones Wilson. Although he learned to read relatively late (at age seven) and only read a weekly comic
Colin Wilson ()
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Brief Lives
Vaughan Rapatahana remembers the singular English existentialist.
Colin Wilson was perhaps England’s only famous existentialist philosopher. Indeed, Robert Solomon’s book Existentialism includes Wilson as the sole British representative of existentialism. (Here I’ll pass over the many other designations of Wilson, such as mystic, occultist, criminologist, and so on, for his lasting philosophical achievements eclipse his other interests.) However Wilson attended no university, and achieved no academic qualifications, despite Iris Murdoch trying to convince him of the benefits of a university education; as he wrote in his memoir The Angry Years in “She and I took an immediate liking to one another… and when she learned that I had not been to a university, offered to get me a scholarship at Oxford, a suggestion I gratefully declined.” Indeed Wilson only wen
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